A Tale of Two Blankets
by TechnicolorNina
Summary: Rex and Martha: Two people with one blanket on one very, very cold night. Rex/Martha A/U, very, very precanon.


**Title:** A Tale of Two Blankets  
**Character/Pairing/Group:** Rex/Martha, mentions of Rudger  
**Prompt:** #58 - Blanket  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Genre:** Shameless fluff and comedy.  
**Pairing:** Rex/Martha  
**Summary:** Two people. Two blankets. One very cold night.  
**Notes:** Current NaNo count: 10 314

* * *

The winters here are cold.

Not as cold as Germany, certainly; Italy is too far south for that, but it's certainly cold enough to warrant bundling up in December, particularly for someone who spent most of his childhood and all of his teenage years in the warmer-still temperatures of southern Japan. And so when he goes to bed he is fully dressed – drawstring bottoms, a T-shirt, hooded sweatshirt at the ready on the chair by the bed if the heat in the building, unreliable at best, should decide to keel over at two in the morning again.

Martha is already sleeping; they have not been engaged long, but it's been long enough for him to learn just how very much the café takes out of her on weekend shifts. She has started staying with him and Rudger on weekends, and he suspects it's at least partly because she knows he will make sure there is something for her to eat so she doesn't have to cook for herself after twelve hours of doing it for everyone else in this town. In the dim light of his bedside lamp her skin looks like some fantastically expensive and luxurious dark fabric, silk or perhaps velvet. He sits down and swings his legs under the blankets, watching her for a few long moments as she sighs in her sleep and shifts, the shirt she has filched from his closet shifting with her and revealing the top swell of a single full breast.

He lays down and turns off the light, spooning around her not just because he loves her (although he does) or because he is a particularly demonstrative person (he isn't), but because even with the geriatric radiator spitting out irregular wisps of hot air the windows are drafty, and the temperature outside is well below freezing. She curls up in his arms, head against his chest, and murmurs something incoherent that belongs more to whatever dream she is lost in than it does to his ears. He runs his fingers through her hair, trying all the same to keep his arm beneath the blanket and mostly succeeding, and it isn't long before he sleeps.

He isn't sure, at first, which has woken him: the chime of the clock, which likes to pretend it is broken most of the time but can sound to wake the deaf and dead when it chooses, or the cold, which in spite of his shirt is creeping down his back like the grasping fingers of an arthritic but insistent old woman. He reaches automatically for his sweatshirt, wondering if he should get another blanket out of the closet between his room and Rudger's, or if he should just try to stick it out with the sweatshirt, and then he pauses, because there is no point in getting a third blanket if he's just kicked the first two to the floor.

He sits up and reaches toward the end of the bed to pull them back up, counting it a small blessing that Martha either does not feel the cold or does not mind it enough to wake. He grasps the blankets with one hand, tugs . . . and is met with a sleepy moan of protest from the other half of the bed.

The line of the blankets does not spill over the end of the bed.

He sits there in not a little disbelief, staring at the gray and blue knitted cocoon his fiancée has made around herself with the blanket his mother made when he was perhaps five years old. Then he slides his hand toward it. If he cannot get back beneath the patterned coverlet that hides beneath the thick knitted afghan, he can at least pull on his sweatshirt and get by in relative comfort with the top blanket only.

Her fingers tighten in the weave of the afghan when his fingers slide beneath it.

He sighs; this is not the time of night to be fighting with a sleeping woman who has appropriated his blankets. He tries to pull an edge loose one more time, just wanting to get beneath so he can go back to sleep; he has an exam in the morning he does not want to fail.

This time the afghan moves – not much, but enough that he can untangle her fingers from it and slide quickly beneath.

Then he realises he has forgotten his sweatshirt.

He slides back from under the blanket to pull it on. There is a rustle of wool on cotton sheets, and when he turns around, the stray edge of afghan is pulled tight into that cocoon-shape again.

If he wasn't afraid of waking her, he would groan. Instead he sets about trying to pull the blankets away again, but her fingers are already worked deep into the gray and blue knits and purls, threaded between wefts of yarn worked long ago into the kind of double-knit ribbed pattern that made his mother's blankets the only kind he and Rudger ever needed on the bed they shared in the flat that was the only one their mother could afford. The sheets on their tiny twin mattress in that cramped and cheerless flat always seemed a little damp, but that was just because they got so cold – the rickety central heating in that building makes this building look like a greenhouse by comparison. There were days – and still are – that he is convinced that winters spent in that building were warmer outside than in. The thick knitted afghans fended off that chill, but they also provide a great way to avoid having the blanket stolen in the middle of the night, by, say, a fiancée who doesn't like to share.

At last he gives up, getting up as quietly as he can and padding to his bureau to pull out a thick pair of socks. He tugs them on, then bundles into his sweatshirt and lays back down on the bed, wrapping his arms around Martha's blanket-swaddled form. It isn't entirely a romantic gesture – some part of him is hoping that eventually she'll turn or shift and he can slide back beneath the blankets – but before he can manage it, he's sleeping again.

It is warm when he becomes aware again – part of it is that the heat has finally kicked on, but another part of it is that he is surrounded not just by warm air but by warm softness, as well.

He reaches up sleepily in the dark to feel what is above him. His fingers meet a thick double-knit, and then Martha kisses the corner of his mouth.

" . . . . time 's't?" he mumbles, not awake enough to even look at the clock, and in her rich accent she tells him that it is five-thirty and she is on her way to work, that he was up later than she, that he should sleep. He turns his head just enough to brush the long fan of dark hair off his face and kiss her goodbye.

Then she is gone and he is left, mostly asleep again already, curled up beneath the blankets she has covered him with.


End file.
